Shanghainese love their steamed buns and were outraged this year to learn that the manufacturer of a popular brand was using dye to make cheap wheat buns look like the more expensive black rice buns. In the southern city of Dongguan, 17 noodle manufacturers were caught adding ink and paraffin wax to give their products the look and texture of more expensive varieties.
"We have a saying in China that 'food is the people's god,' so obviously it is very scary for ordinary people when things like this happen," said Xiao Andong, a veterinary feed expert with the Hunan Institute of Veterinary Feed Control. Xiao was one of the investigators in the wedding poisoning case, but he said tests were inconclusive because the food had been consumed by the time experts were called in.
Clenbuterol, the suspect in the poisoning, results in a larger, leaner pig that yields more expensive meat. Although it was banned in pig feed in the 1990s, it is still used under the name "lean pork powder," because lean pork commands about 60 cents more per pound than fatty pork.
"The profit margin is bigger than drug trafficking if you add the lean pork powder to the pig food," said Zhou Qing, an author and dissident, who has styled himself as China's equivalent of Upton Sinclair, whose 1906 novel, "The Jungle," exposed the horrors of the U.S. meatpacking industry.
In 2006, Zhou published a book about the Chinese food industry that would extinguish the heartiest appetite. He wrote about foods tainted with pesticides, industrial salts, bleaches, paints and, especially nauseating, imitation soy sauce made from clippings swept up from hairdressers' floors, sold for 5 cents per pound and sent to factories that extract from it an amino acid solution. Zhou wrote that fish farmers confessed to pouring so many antibiotics and hormones into their ponds that "they never eat the fish that they farm."
Although Zhou's book has been published in 10 countries — it sold 50,000 copies in Japan alone — it is not available in China. After failing to get the book in shops, receiving threats from police and getting beaten up by thugs, Zhou left China in 2008. He now lives in Germany.
"In China, the reflexive desire to cover up and hide has trumped transparency and the need to protect public health," said Phelim Kine, a researcher for Human Rights Watch.
The poor treatment of whistleblowers makes it nearly impossible for a consumer movement to take root. The Health Ministry went so far as to announce this month that it would set up a blacklist of journalists who were deemed to report irresponsibly on food safety issues.
Last year, He Dongping, a professor of food sciences at Wuhan Polytechnic University, in Hubei province, published results of an investigation into the recycling of discarded cooking oil, which was being scooped out of sewers outside restaurants, reprocessed and then sold at a fraction of the cost of fresh cooking oil. He found that one in 10 restaurants in his area bought the recycled oil, even though it was known to contain a carcinogenic fungus.
Afterward, the professor was reprimanded by the university and ordered not to speak again about cooking oil. Contacted this month, he hung up when told the caller was a foreign journalist.
Even victims are punished if they complain too loudly. Zhao Lianhai, an advertising executive who led a campaign for safer baby formula after his son developed kidney stones as a result of the melamine-tainted baby formula, was sentenced in November to 2 1/2 years in prison for "inciting social disorder."
As a result, people are often too frightened to speak up. More than a dozen who were contacted about their experience at the wedding in Wufeng begged not to have their full names used. They said their medical bills had been paid by the local government and the newlyweds' parents, who were connected to the local Communist Party branch. They said they never got answers about what had happened.
"We asked many times, but there were no answers. The doctors wouldn't say. So we stopped asking," said one woman, adding nervously before hanging up the phone, "Don't tell anyone I told you this."
barbara.demick@latimes.com
Nicole Liu and Tommy Yang of The Times' Beijing bureau contributed to this report.
